In the following portion of a chapter from their book Katherme Mansfield, Hanson and Gurr recount what is known regarding Mansfield's impetus for writing "Miss Brill" and discuss how Miss Brill manufactures a "false sense of community" that brings about her epiphany.

.. .'Miss Brill', written soon after Katherine Mansfield arrived in Menton in November 1920, is structurally related to 'Bliss' as a story in which a shift of feeling in one character is conveyed in a single scene. With unity of action, time and place these shorter stories tend to seem more 'realistic' than episodic pieces like Prelude or 'Je ne parle pas franc, ais'. However, this smooth narrative texture is in a sense appearance only. As much as in Prelude the stories are structured according to the demands of symbolist patterning and almost every detail has a symbolic as well as narrative context. There are also narrative suppressions...